When comparing Telegram vs Reach, the Slant community recommends Telegram for most people. In the question“What are the best messaging apps for iOS?”Telegram is ranked 1st while Reach is ranked 29th. The most important reason people chose Telegram is:

Copy/paste videos, gifs, images, geolocation, documents, and even executable files. Drag over files for practically any time up to 1.5GB in size. Images can be compressed, too.

Pros

Pro

Free and convenient large file sharing

Copy/paste videos, gifs, images, geolocation, documents, and even executable files. Drag over files for practically any time up to 1.5GB in size. Images can be compressed, too.

Pro

Privacy focused

In addition to the end-to-end encryption that provides privacy to communications, the app also includes self destructing timers for chats, and the ability to permanently delete messages, yours and theirs, from your device.

Pro

Free of cost

The application is available free of cost.

Pro

Media messaging

Videos, gifs, images, geolocation, and documents.

Pro

Beautiful UI

Very customizable with a lot of clean looking options.

Pro

Possible to send photos and videos without compression

Pro

Channels for one way broadcasting

Broadcasting channels suitable for announcing things.

Pro

Two-step verification

You can set up an additional password to your account, which can be reset by your email. You don't have to use an email if you do not want to. If you lose access to your email or forget your password, you will be able to reset it via text message if your account is over seven days old and will receive it within a week (in case you recover anything before then).

Pro

Secure

Telegram uses an open source MTProto encryption protocol that provides complete end-to-end encryption for secret chats. To show off their confidence in the protocol the company behind Telegram has organized $200,000 and $300,000 challenges to break the encryption. So far there have been no winners.

Pro

Supergroups of up to 200,000 people

In Supergroups, anyone along with admins can delete their messages from all sides. A message can be pinned to the top. All of the user's messages can be deleted by an administrator, and they can be banned and reported as well. Supergroups can have a public link (outside of Asia, due to high spam volumes), which is also a username.

Pro

Save time with inline bots and link previews

Unfortunately, on the desktop videos don't play, but images are viewable without visiting popular websites like imgur and Instagram.

You can play YouTube videos and others within the app, so you don't need to embed code or anything.

With inline bots, such as @gif, @pic/bing, @vid/YouTube, etc, you can look things up without leaving the client or chat that you're in. Simply type the name and some keywords and wait for the results to load.

Pro

Desktop app handles HIDPI

The desktop app has a built in setting to scale the UI of the app up to 200% which allows for those with 4k monitors/screens to use the app without scaling issues.

Pro

Cloud chat keys are kept in different jurisdiction

Even though encryption used for cloud-based storage (e.g. Gmail, Facebook, iCloud) may not be as secure as end-to-end encryption or zero-knowledge storage, Telegram does the most that it can by holding keys to chats in different jurisdictions, requiring intergovernmental cooperation to obtain the keys. This is aside from whatever other security measures have been taken, of course.

Pro

High quality calls

Uses the latest GPL audio codecs, such as Opus, an adaptative high-quality codec that supersedes AAC at any bitrate.

Pro

Customer support is within the app

Although it's volunteer based, but still pretty top-notch if available, which it tends to be.

Pro

Saved messages

You can write messages to yourself. You can write some notes, add links, and see everything across all your devices.

Pro

Open source client apps

Client apps are open source, making whole service more trustworthy.

Pro

@mentions

You can ping people to get their attention by @mentioning them.

Pro

Voice and video messages

You can post voice and video messages if you are too lazy to write text messages.

Pro

Multiplatform native client apps

There are native desktop, mobile and web client apps, that are optimized for speed and are light on memory usage.

Pro

Banned in China

Pro

Pinned Messages

You can pin messages to the top of groups or supergroups so members will see them when opening the group.

Pro

Popular in the USA

On SimilarWeb you can see that Telegram is on the top 15 among all communication apps.

Pro

Unlimited storage

Unlimited number of files can be stored forever on the cloud. You can upload files up to 1.5 GB each.

Pro

Self-destruct messages

Messages can be set on a timer. They will disappear after the timer expires.

Pro

Mass message multiple people at once

Ability to send a single message to multiple people without exposing their contact information to each other. Reach sends individual messages to the group rather than starts a group chat.

Pro

Personalized and Individual conversations in "Group Mode"

When sending a message to a group of people, Reach starts a private conversation in your Messages, Mail or WhatsApp apps respectively for each recipient

Pro

Reusable Recipient Groups

Pro

Reach does not require the recipient to have Reach installed on their device. Instead it uses the existing messaging apps on the device to send the message to the recipient.

Pro

Message Templates Feature

Prepare message templates which can be reused. Message templates can have recipients name variable, for example the template "hey {first name}!" will be populated with the recipients first name when the message is sent out

Pro

Free texting through Google Voice

Reach integrates with Google Voice and allows to send free text messages in the U.S.A and low rates across the globe

Pro

Fully automated mass texting with free SMS

Using Google Voice integration, Reach is able to send mass texts in a fully automated mode (without the need to press "Send" button for each message)

Ad

Cons

Con

Not fully open source

Telegram has an open API and protocol free for everyone, but the backend software is not open source. Therefore 100% privacy can not be evaluated.

Con

Can only be used with a phone number

It is not possible to activate and use Telegram by mail etc. You need a phone number.

Con

Only "Secret Chat" messages are encrypted end to end

The only way to get end-to-end encryption (client-client) using Telegram is to use the Secret Chat function, anything through the service is server-client encrypted. Also secret chat is only implemented in the mobile apps, meaning there is no way to encrypt messages end-to-end when using the desktop client or the web browser client.

Con

"Secret Chat" feature is not available for desktop client

Secret chats with end to end encryption are only available on mobile apps.

Con

No source code sintax highlighting

Telegram does not have source code syntax highlighting, making it difficult to share code snippets.

Con

Does not work for visually impaired

Doesn't work for visually impaired.

Con

Does not support spherical 360° photos

Spherical 360° photos becoming more popular these days, but Telegram does not support such format.

Con

Does not support text messaging

You can NOT make it your default text messaging App.

Con

Need to press "Send" button per each recipient

When sending a message to a group, the user must press "Send" button for each recipient. The only work around is to use Google Voice integration for fully automatic mass texting

Alternative Products

Each month, over 2.8 million people use Slant to find the best products and share their knowledge. Pick the tags you’re passionate about to get a personalized feed and begin contributing your knowledge.